Research Interests

Theme A. Human-like Natural Dialog System

We aim to create a dialog system that behave more like humans. This research includes a wide range of themes such as spoken language processing, dialog strategy, sentence gneeration, utterance timing detection, pshycholinguisitics, speech recoginition and speech synthesis. These areas have many challenging tasks unresolved.

Our approach is human-like, not just the behaviour but also the model. While implementing element technologies, we try creating an integrated dialog system that can be tested in a real world tasks.

AI-wolf project

"Are You a Werewolf?" is a conversation based role playing game where players try to determine whether other players are humans or werewolfs. AI-wolf project aims to make an AI system that can play with humans. We participate this project as an NLP dialog system task.

Natural Language Generation

To achieve the goal of dialog system, we need natural language generation. We try to create advertisement copies and stories, in addition to the dialog system.

Theme B. Applications of Natural Language Processing

Medical and Clinical NLP

There is still less research activity in the area of Japanese medical document processing. As a benchmark, we challenge to solve the Japanese National Doctor Examination. One of our goals is to provide a diagnosis support system that helps doctors and patients. Our projects includes an automatic diagnosis for mental diseases, and automatic summarization of electorinic health records. We also wish to expand our target language into English in future.

Legal NLP

We organize and participate Legal Bar Exam competition (COLIEE) where original Japanese version and English version are provided. This research theme includes logic, inference and abstraction based on NLP, could be an "automatic lawyer" in future.

Todai Robot Project

The Todai Robot project aims to create AI systems that can solve entrance examinations of Japanese universities. We have been participating this project in History subjects, achieved better score than the average of students in a mock exam test. This solver system could be used as a question answering system in other domains. The project's mock exam challenge terminated in 2016.

Text Mining of Research Papers

Many new papers are published everyday. It is almost impossible for human researchers to manually read such a huge number of documents. We implement text mining tools to extract new findings from English research papers.

Text Mining of Web and SNS

Websites and SNS pages potentially include personal behaviours of each user, especially when connected with other domains of data. We try to create applications that can find new characteristics of user behaviors mainly on Japanese pages.

Fully automated NLP platform from installation to machine learning

We provide an integrated NLP system compliant with the UIMA framework, together with the world largest compatible and interoperable language resources. Its features include automatic installation, workflow generation, text and annotation visualization, comparison and evaluation, annotation search, and machine learning.

Peer Reviewed Conference Papers

Yoshinobu Kano. Between Platform and APIs: Kachako API for Developers. Third International Workshop on Worldwide Language Service Infrastructure and Second Workshop on Open Infrastructures and Analysis Frameworks for Human Language Technologies (WLSI3nOIAF2) at the 26th International Conference on Computational Linguistics (COLING 2016). 2016/12/12.

Yoshinobu Kano. Answering Yes-No Questions by Penalty Scoring in History Subjects of University Entrance Examinations. Open Knowledge Base and Question Answering Workshop (OKBQA2016) at the 26th International Conference on Computational Linguistics (COLING 2016). 2016/12/11.. 2016/12/12.

Yoshinobu Kano. Kachako: a Hybrid-Cloud Unstructured Information Platform for Full Automation of Service Composition, Scalable Deployment and Evaluation. In the 1st International Workshop on Analytics Services on the Cloud (ASC), the 10th International Conference on Services Oriented Computing (ICSOC 2012). Shanghai, China, November 12nd 2012. Best Paper Award.

Yoshinobu Kano. Kachako: Towards a Data-Centric Platform for Full Automation of Service Selection, Composition, Scalable Deployment and Evaluation. In the International Conference of Web Services (ICWS 2012). Hawaii, USA, June 24th, 2012.

Yoshinobu Kano. Towards automation in using multi-modal language resources: compatibility and interoperability for multi-modal features in Kachako. In the 8th International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC 2012). Istanbul, Turkey, May 23rd, 2012